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Reduction and recovery of keystone predation pressure after disease-related mass mortality.
Moritsch MM
,
Raimondi PT
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Disturbances such as disease can reshape communities through interruption of ecological interactions. Changes to population demographics alter how effectively a species performs its ecological role. While a population may recover in density, this may not translate to recovery of ecological function. In 2013, a sea star wasting syndrome outbreak caused mass mortality of the keystone predator Pisaster ochraceus on the North American Pacific coast. We analyzed sea star counts, biomass, size distributions, and recruitment from long-term intertidal monitoring sites from San Diego to Alaska to assess regional trends in sea star recovery following the outbreak. Recruitment, an indicator of population recovery, has been spatially patchy and varied within and among regions of the coast. Despite sea star counts approaching predisease numbers, sea star biomass, a measure of predation potential on the mussel Mytilus californianus, has remained low. This indicates that post-outbreak populations have not regained their full predation pressure. The regional variability in percent of recovering sites suggested differences in factors promoting sea star recovery between regions but did not show consistent patterns in postoutbreak recruitment on a coast-wide scale. These results shape predictions of where changes in community composition are likely to occur in years following the disease outbreak and provide insight into how populations of keystone species resume their ecological roles following mortality-inducing disturbances.
Figure 1.
Pisaster ochraceus with sea star wasting syndrome symptoms. The body can appear deflated. White lesions appear on the body wall, followed by tissue decay, arm loss, and death
Figure 2. Map of sites that have begun population recovery in (a) 2015, (b) 2016, and (c) 2017. Closed black circles represent sites with post‐SSWS‐born Pisaster ochraceus present. Open red circles with an “x” represent sites with no post‐SSWS‐born P. ochraceus present
Figure 3. Regional means of (a) log‐transformed counts and (b) log‐transformed biomass of Pisaster ochraceus as the proportion of each site's pre‐SSWS mean. Light gray bars represent 2015, medium gray bars represent 2016, and black bars represent 2017. Error bars denote standard error. Sites sampled each year are described in Tables S1 and S3. In 2016 and 2017, all sites sampled in the CA Channel Islands region had either no pre‐SSWS size data or had counts of 0 individuals, preventing calculation of mean biomass
Figure 4. Rate of change in relative biomass per unit increase in relative counts. The height of the bar represents the slope of the linear regression between change in proportion of pre‐SSWS count and change in proportion of pre‐SSWS biomass between two consecutive years. Only regions with enough sites (n ≥ 4) in consecutive years are shown. Dashed reference line at y = 0.67 represents the average slope of the linear regression between change in proportion of count and biomass at sites from 1989 to 2012
Figure 6. Regional mean similarity of Pisaster ochraceus size structure to the long‐term pre‐SSWS (1989–2012) mean size structure. Point heights represent the average D statistic of the K–S test (i.e., difference between current and pre‐SSWS distributions) for all sites in a region from 2015 to 2017. Error bars denote standard error. A single line for error bars indicates that only one site in that region had size data that year. The WA Olympic Coast region had no size data in 2017. The CA Channel Islands had no size data in 2016 and 2017
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